


Better Now

by randomhorse



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Captain America: The First Avenger, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-26
Updated: 2014-06-26
Packaged: 2018-02-06 07:41:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1849948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomhorse/pseuds/randomhorse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky doesn’t know what they injected him with, but he can count the marks the needles left on his forearms and he can feel it running through his veins, ice cold and burning.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>After Steve rescues Bucky from Zola's laboratory, Bucky has to come to terms with the fact that Steve is not who he remembers him to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Better Now

Bucky doesn’t know what they injected him with, but he can count the marks the needles left on his forearms and he can feel it running through his veins, ice cold and burning. The man he calls Steve guides them through the woods, the army base in their backs. It takes a while until the sound of screams fades but they never quite escape the smell of fire. It sticks to their clothes and hair and skin.

Steve slows down for the wounded – he’s stronger than all of them, now, but considerate – but Bucky knows that he wants nothing more than to put as much distance as possible between the remains of Zola’s laboratory and them. Steve’s worried eyes never seem to leave him. He feels them in his neck when Steve falls back and when Steve leads the way – such an unfamiliar concept for them – his head turns constantly as if to make sure that Bucky is still there.

Bucky would give anything to not have to look at Steve.

When Steve ripped the belts of his arms and helped him up from the stretcher and half guided, half carried him out of the flames, when Steve’s fingers, huge and clumsy in their gloves, brushed the hair from his eyes, and he was larger than life, looming over him, Bucky blamed it on the fever, on the drugs, on the months spent at the mercy of cruel men, with only dreams as an escape. Steve has always been bigger in his dreams.

But he’s coming back to his senses now, slowly, slowly, with every breath of clean forest air, with every drop of sweat that flushes the poison out of his system, and Steve is still a mountain, and he’s still looking at him as if he might break any moment.

They don’t make camp for the night when it gets dark again, they keep moving. Those who are too weak to walk get a seat on one of the tanks. Bucky keeps the pace and doesn’t feel pain or hunger. He focuses on his movements and only notices that his mind has gone blank when Steve falls back to him and orders him to the front.

No.

He asks him.

He asks. Shortly after, the camp comes in sight, and Bucky follows Captain America as his left wingman, just one step behind, and Steve turns his head to catch his eye, and Bucky forces a smile.

Save for the few instances when Bucky had to carry Steve, they’ve always walked side by side. Now Steve is in the lead and Bucky follows, and the ground feels shaky and unbalanced. His fingers and toes are ice cold and almost without sense of touch. As far as Bucky knows, no one spent as much time in Zola’s back room as he did. None of them lasted as long.

The crowd parts and cheers for the man with the red white and blue shield.

“Let’s hear it for Captain America!” Bucky shouts, and the crowd responds in kind, and Bucky has to turn away because the man wearing stars and stripes is Steve, but _not_ Steve, and it makes him feel sick to the stomach. Bucky doesn’t know what they injected him with, but it might very well have been bitterness.

 

Bucky’s dreams are brighter now. When his eyes finally fall shut his subconscious pours out memories he never even knew he had. He wakes up drenched in sweat, the taste of cotton candy fresh on his lips; the taste of that first kiss with Myrtle Johnson. Nausea from Coney Island rides. His school bag leaving bruises on the back of his bare knees, dangling from his shoulders on too-long straps. A smaller hand in his.

He suddenly remembers a Sunday afternoon in August, hot, the asphalt almost boiling, and he remembers emerging covered in dust and blood, body aching, the echo of the hits he received still humming in his bones. He also remembers Steve’s face, his brows knitted and his mouth an angry line because _I could’ve done it, Bucky, I had him on the ropes._ He remembers a sort of heat swelling inside of him that, miraculously, was not anger or disappointment.

 

A light touch is enough to jerk him from his dreams and have him sit upright in his bed, his arms fighting restraints that aren’t there anymore. In the damp green darkness of his tent, not far enough from the Austrian border, his ragged breath leaves white clouds hanging in the air.

It needs a second for him to realize that it’s Steve sitting on the edge of his bed, Steve who was trying to cover him with another blanket – his own, apparently.

“You’re cold”, Steve says, and Bucky shakes his head, because even though his whole body is trembling he doesn’t feel the chill.

“You sure?”, Steve says, “your hands are freezing”, and Bucky looks down to find his left hand in Steve’s. Steve is only wearing a tank top, and for a split second Bucky finds himself worrying, more out of habit than anything else, because Steve’s new body radiates heat and seems to be glowing in the dim light of the gas lamp.

Bucky leans forward and his forehead falls against Steve’s shoulder, and Steve’s arms close around him, and everything about this is wrong. There are concaves where there used to be convexes and Steve is crushing him, and there are no edges, no bones, just muscle like concrete, and Bucky can hardly breathe.

He struggles to free himself from Steve’s grip, get some distance between them, look at him.

“You were shaking”, Steve says, his voice low. And with that huge body of his, and that new face – all sharp edges and determined jawline – Bucky finds that Steve’s voice is still the same, and that at least is some sort of comfort.

He forces himself to look at Steve, because there’s something like hurt in his eyes, and even though practically nothing else is the same about him, that look still makes Bucky do things he never wanted to do. He needs to look at Steve like he always did, because he owes him, he owes him more than he ever did before, because now Steve has saved his life not only in that metaphorical way of giving him a purpose and all that bullshit, but literally, physically, by dragging him out of a collapsing, burning, exploding building, and that’s not something Bucky can ever hope to repay.

“What did they do to you, Steve”, Bucky says, and not because he wants to know. He says it because he wants the men responsible to own up to it and he wants to put a bullet through each and every single one of their brains. “What happened to you”, Bucky says.

“I went to war”, Steve responds simply, quietly, and rolls his shoulders forward, folds his huge body into the shape his smaller self used to take whenever he felt like he was taking up too much space, and it looks ridiculous.

Bucky kisses him and it’s not too different from those kisses shared in Brooklyn, behind the toffee apple stall on Coney Island or later in that damp shared apartment that smelled of cat piss and cabbage. It’s timid and short and trying something but not committing to it and oh so sweet.

Steve’s hands cling to his elbows, to his hips, to fistfuls of his undershirt, as if he was afraid Bucky might slip away any moment, and Bucky can tell he is much, much stronger now. When they pull apart, Bucky can taste the bitterness of hurtful words on his tongue, words he never said, words he’s swallowing hard, because he knows that none of this is Steve’s fault, really, and even if it is, he’s better now, and who is Bucky to judge.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I had to get some headcanon-y feelings out, thus the lack of plot. This work wouldn't have been possible without elquist's constant support and hours of headcanon talk on public transport. Thank you!


End file.
